Live from Denmark

I'm currently sitting in my hotel room in Fredericia, Denmark, as tomorrow I'm running a customized version of our OBIEE course for a new customer over here. I flew in to Copenhagen Airport late this afternoon and then got the train from the airport to where I am now; the journey on the train was around two and a half hours and as I wasn't quite sure that I got on the right train, I spent most of the journey (a) not really sure if the sign above me said my seat was already reserved, and (b) whether I was in fact going in the right direction. In the end I got here around 8pm and now I've been spending most of the evening answering emails and getting things set up for tomorrow.

The past few weeks have been fairly hectic what with the preparation for my Open World sessions, adding some new material to the OBIEE course and pulling the seminar material together for my new Oracle 11g Data Warehousing seminar that's running for the first time in Denmark next week. Apart from that I've been teaching and consulting in OBIEE over in Galway (a very nice place), doing some work with Borkur on a Discoverer project in London, and appearing on the panel for a BI Thought Leaders' forum that Imperial College kindly arranged last week. Between now and Open World I've got the three days course delivery this week, then back to London for more Discoverer work, then I'm doing some technical consulting for an Oracle BI Applications project back in the UK for two days, then off to Denmark for the DW seminar, then back to the UK for a day before flying off to San Francisco. In all it's turning into one of those months where we're working flat out and often away from home, in my experience it's often now (autumn) and the early part of the year (February through to May) when we're the most busiest and this year Open World falls right into the middle of it. Hopefully come the end of September things will have calmed down a bit at least in terms of R&D work, however I suspect the first OBIEE 11g beta will arrive around then so I doubt I'll actually get much spare time.

Apart from consulting and training, the other thing we've been working on is pulling an agenda together for the first of our "Oracle BI Training Days" events, where we'll be hiring out a venue in London for three days and offering intensive, expert-level training on OBIEE and the Oracle BI Applications for a small, public audience, plus a social event on one of the evenings where we'll all get a chance to go out for a meal and shoot the breeze on Oracle BI development. There'll be more news on this during the next week or so, but if you're interested the dates are likely to be the 22nd through to the 24th of October, the venue will be Canary Wharf London, and we'll post more details soon.